US movie studios are gearing up to send a message to consumer electronics …

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Five major US studios are suing Samsung for developing and briefly selling at least one DVD player which they allege was not properly secured to protect the contents of encrypted DVDs, according to reports. A brief investigation into the matter suggests that Disney, Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox, Time Warner and and Universal Studios are pursuing the company for being "hacker-friendly," inasmuch as the company has developed products that allow savvy users to bypass the limitations imposed by content owners. While neither the studios nor Samsung have revealed the contents of the suit, Samsung has admitted that they believe that their DVD-HD841 DVD player is at the center of all of this.

"In fact, we do not exactly know the contents of the lawsuit and the intention of the plaintiffs. We have yet to receive the complaint,’’ a Samsung spokesman said, guessing that the DVD-HD841 player is at the center of the lawsuit. "If so, I do not know why the movie studios are complaining about the products, of which production was brought to an end more than 15 months ago.... We stopped manufacturing the model after concerns erupted that its copy-protection features can be circumvented by sophisticated users,’’ he said.

The fact that Samsung is so willing to speculate on the cause of the lawsuit publicly piqued my interest, so I began looking into the situation over the last couple of days. Here's what my digging has turned up.

The DVD-HD841 player was sold for only a few months in 2004, and the unit was not well received by consumers. Aimed at budget-conscious consumers looking for an upscaling DVD player, the DVD-HD841 failed to deliver, and Samsung pulled it from the market. The units can still be purchased on many sites catering to used electronics, but new units have been missing from retail shelves for about a year.

Why would such an unremarkable player be at the center of a lawsuit? As it turns out, the DVD-HD841 player allows users to circumvent both region encoding and HDCP. It has been known for some time that the major studios are unhappy with the number of DVD players that allow users to circumvent region encoding practices, either by allowing too many "resets" of a unit's geographic location, or allowing users to turn off compliance altogether.

Samsung's player allows users to completely disable region encoding compliance, meaning that the player can handle any DVD without the need for resetting geographical locations, or other such inconveniences. While Samsung does not provide a menu option or instructions on how to do this, news quickly spread that a code entered by remote control under the right settings would rid users of this annoyance.

But Samsung's offenses did not stop there. Similar codes could also be used to turn off HDCP compliance, making it possible to use DVI-D interfaces with non-HDCP compliant sources. In short, users could output high-quality digital HD content (including upscaled DVD content, no less) to any interface they wanted, completely stripped of encryption. The upshot of this is that Samsung released a player that would be ideal for pirates (although pirates already have myriad ways around these protections, anyway).

Additional investigation has revealed that while the DVD-HD841 player did not last long on the market, the design was partially used in other DVD players, including the DVD-HD747 and the DVD-HD941. I was also able to determine that similar hacks work on other Samsung players, although I was not able to verify in all instances whether or not a player was based on the DVD-HD841 main board. I did locate a number of resellers who were hacking various Samsung players and reselling them. Without a doubt, Samsung appears to have produced a bevy of products that can be exploited in this way.

Consumer electronics, bow down!

Still, Samsung is not the only company that has manufactured players that consumers have subsequently been able to reprogram in some form or another for the purposes of bypassing content protections, although exploits for circumventing HDCP are rather rare. The question is, why this lawsuit, now?

The answer lies in the next-generation of optical formats. While DeCCS essentially destroyed the content protections designed for DVDs, the next-generation is supposedly protected with far greater technical acuity. Blu-ray discs, for instance, will feature protections designed to either dynamically obtain new keys or even revoke existing keys from devices that are compromised. In this respect, I believe that this lawsuit is about sending a message. As the studios hope to see a flawless introduction of their new digital rights management schemes, they want to make it clear to all consumer electronics companies that they do not want to see their plans foiled by companies catering to those of us who want to bypass the content industry's protections.

Are we all dirty pirates? Not in the slightest.

The reason for this lawsuit happening right now is simple. The studios know that there is going to be a significant spike in demand for next-generation players that can bypass HDCP over the next few years. When Joe Consumer discovers the delicious little treat known as "HDCP"a treat that will likely make it impossible to play HD content on displays and TVs without HDCP supporthe's not going to like it. While there are no official numbers, we believe that there are millions of HDTV sets in the United States that were purchased before HDCP and HDMI (a DVI-like interface with HDCP) were made available. As things currently stand, those TVs will never display HD content according to their true abilities. Those nice, expensive HDTVs will be trapped in 480p purgatory.

A next-gen player that can deliver HD content to such televisions would be a big, big seller. People who buy TVs that support 1080i expect them to display HD content in 1080i, not 480p. One way around that would be to disable HDCP. Hollywood wants to make it clear that this is simply not acceptable. It shouldn't have been done in the past, and the stakes are higher going forward.

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Ken Fisher
Ken is the founder & Editor-in-Chief of Ars Technica. A veteran of the IT industry and a scholar of antiquity, Ken studies the emergence of intellectual property regimes and their effects on culture and innovation. Emailken@arstechnica.com//Twitter@kenfisher